


No Good Reason

by Deannie



Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: 3K Round-up Challenge, Gen, Supermagnificent AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 19:07:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7118836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ezra could think of no good reason why he was contemplating this particular course of action. But it wasn’t like he had much of a choice. The trick was going to be when to do it. <i>Part of the Supermagnificent AU.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	No Good Reason

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JoJo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoJo/gifts).



> This is part of the Magnificent Seven Super AU (I've renamed it the Supermagnificent AU because I'm the god here so I say so). You can find the first story in that one, [Assembly, here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6205438/chapters/14215972), or look for all the fics by searching for the Supermagnificent AU tag.
> 
> This is for Tony Starke's birthday (No, not THAT Tony Stark. Tony Starke, the actor who plays Ezra.). Also, at some point I promised JoJo Ezra and explosives. Enjoy, dear!

Ezra could think of no good reason why he was contemplating this particular course of action. But it wasn’t like he had much of a choice. The trick was going to be when to do it.

“They’re gonna cut us all down at this rate!” Vin shouted from his spot behind one of the too-small rocks off to Ezra’s left. The man’s wings were useless in the current fight, unfortunately, but his sharp shooting on the ground was appreciated. Or had been until the outlaws had gotten into their current, fully defensible position.

The gang had run for the hills as soon as it became obvious they weren’t going to succeed in getting the gold that the stagecoach was carrying. Given that they’d killed four people in a similar heist three months before, Chris had decided they weren’t going to get away this time.

But the hills had conveniently hid their ingenious base of operations: an abandoned, reinforced army shack nestled up against a sheer rock face. The shack walls were lined in metal and there were only four small slits for windows. Just perfect for picking off peacekeepers.

And they clearly had enough ammunition squirreled away in there to simply keep firing until they hit something.

“God _damn!_ ” Buck yelled angrily, pain thick in his voice.

 _Until they hit something_ else _,_ Ezra thought grimly. That was two. Chris had been hit in the shoulder when the gang actually attacked the stage, and his angry grunt and clear lack of infirmity had been what scared the men into running in the first place. It was disconcerting to see a man take a bullet that should have at least unseated him and then simply growl and continue to pursue you.

“It ain’t bad, Nathan,” Buck gritted, though he sounded like it was worse than advertized. “Stay put.”

Ezra sighed, bowing to the inevitable. The good reasons were piling up. “It appears staying put is no longer an option.” He looked over at Vin. More importantly, he looked at the saddlebag Vin had retrieved before he slapped Peso’s rump and sent the horse to safety. “Vin!” he called, trying not to be heard from too far away. “Do you have the dynamite?”

Vin looked over at him with a queer look. “What the hell do you—?”

“For Mrs. Welles’s tree stump. Just tell me you still have it,” Ezra broke in. There was little time to explain.

“Well, yeah,” Vin said, “but—”

Ezra grinned, knowing how crazy he probably looked. “Be right there.”

He called up the silver from his skin and wrapped it around himself, invisible in seconds. Well, invisible to anyone who wasn’t Vin—and it was still strange to have someone actually _watch_ him when he was in the silver. He sprinted toward his friend, drawing no attention and lucky to miss any stray bullets. Vin was staring at him like he was patently insane. Which, lately, seemed to be mostly true.

“Damnit, Ezra, don’t do nothing stupid,” Vin murmured to him as Ezra dug invisibly through the saddlebag. He came up with the half stick of dynamite Vin had been planning to use to demolish a particularly stubborn tree stump at Nettie Welles’s ranch. The fuse was acceptably long.

“As we are acquainted, I won’t deign to answer that,” Ezra replied, wrapping the dynamite in silver as well, and smiling at his friend. Vin had tried to explain what he looked like when he was invisible—something like a smudged and unclear charcoal sketch—but he hoped the gesture translated. “I’ll be back.”

He dashed around to the side of the dispute, working hard to dodge friendly fire and foes.

“God damn it, Standish,” Buck gritted, loud enough to be heard as Ezra ran near, though the gambler knew he wasn’t being addressed. “Chris, I don’t know what the hell he’s planning, but he’s gonna get himself killed.”

Possible. But Ezra was hoping not. In a perfect world, he’d simply slip the stick of TNT into their hideout and either blow them up or send them running. He fetched up against the leeward wall of the structure, safely out of direct fire, and shook the silver from the dynamite. He did actually _want_ them to see it coming, after all. He’d always believed in giving a man a fighting chance.

The fuse lit, he slipped the stick into the nearest gun slit, careful to avoid the gun already there.

As expected, the man inside took exception.

“Jesus God, Carmichael!” he heard dimly through the reinforced walls. “They threw in dynamite!”

Ezra grinned and prepared to run. He tried Josiah’s trick and “radiated” expectation and readiness, hoping Buck would pick up on it.

“Get it the hell out of here!” came muffled reply. “The rest’ll go up if we can’t!”

 _The rest? Oh dear._ Ezra started sprinting toward the trees.

The door of the shack slammed open and the four men they had been pursuing barreled out, guns blazing like they were in one of JD’s penny novels.

“VIN!” Chris’s shout had Ezra spinning around to try to see the hunter, only to be spun around again by the force of a stray bullet burning into his own side. How bad the wound was, he couldn’t say.

And after a few seconds, it hardly mattered. _The rest_ must have been more munitions, because the shack behind him sucked in all the air around it and then spat it and every inch of the structure outward. It slammed into Ezra like a wave in a hurricane and he felt himself lifted bodily toward the trees at the edge of the cliff face.

The explosion’s heat didn’t quite touch him in the silver that enveloped him, thank God, but that split second of relief was blown apart as he impacted with a solid oak tree, his senses fleeing in the wake of a crushing pain in his head.

**********

Chris stood up in the choking dust and dirt and held his guns steady on the four morons who were unconscious on the ground amid the rubble. His ultrasensitive ears were ringing, his shoulder was killing him, Buck and Vin were hit as well, and Standish had gone and blown the whole damn world to bits. They were lucky the cliff face was solid or it would have come right down on all of them.

“Vin’s hurt bad, Chris,” Nathan called, leaning over Tanner's prone body. Chris had seen him go down, blood blossoming across his chest. He looked at Buck, who sat hyped up and agitated, blood flowing sluggishly from a through-and-through in his arm. Buck felt his worry and met his eyes, shaking his head.

“I’m fine.” He was lying through his teeth, of course, but he wasn’t going to bleed to death anytime soon, so Chris moved on.

“JD? Josiah? You two okay?” He let his gaze roam the area until it stopped on a most unlikely sight.

JD was crouched silent and unmoving, clearly stunned by what he’d done. A metal plate from the shack’s siding—nearly three feet by eight and an inch-and-a-half thick—hung in the air, suspended on end, an arm’s length from him, held there by the power of his mind. It would have crushed him if he hadn’t been able to stop it.

“JD?” Chris called again, quietly.

With a start, JD let the plate clatter loudly to the ground and looked over at him with a shit-eating grin. “I’m okay.”

Chris resisted the urge to laugh.

“I’m fine, too,” Josiah proclaimed, on his ass in the dirt behind one of the other rocks. “Though you’ve likely made me deaf, Ezra!”

The shouted barb should have had Ezra making some sort of snide remark. Maybe a dig at the old man’s already questionable senses. When it was met with silence, Josiah clawed his way to his feet and started looking around for a body.

Looking…

_Shit._

“Does anybody know if he stays invisible when he passes out?” Chris asked, dreading the answer.

“God damn,” Buck whispered. It obviously hadn’t occurred to Buck either to ask about that little part of Ezra’s trick. “He could be anywhere.”

He could be dead, but Chris wasn’t going there. It was enough that he had nightmares of a hundred scorched and blistered soldiers marching in his head.

All he could smell right now was dynamite and dirt. Ezra’s burnt silver scent wouldn’t be strong enough to override that. He was drawn back to where Nathan was working over Vin. It looked like he was planning to extract the bullet before he healed him up. Vin was out cold, so his bird-like vision couldn’t help them either.

Chris cursed and surveyed the area, looking for clues.

“He’d’ve had to come up on the shack from one side or the other, not straight up the middle,” he said, turning in a slow circle. “If he ran off the same way, he’d end up…”

“Somewhere in the trees,” Josiah completed for him, heading toward the trees on the east side of the shack.

“I’ll go check the others,” JD exclaimed, heading in the opposite direction. Chris was glad neither of them pointed out the very real possibility that Ezra had been buried in the explosion or just killed outright by it.

Buck snorted, his voice pained. “What are they going to do, stumble around until they trip over him?” he asked. He hadn’t moved from his spot against that boulder and it looked like he wasn’t going to have the strength to anytime soon.

“Nathan, how’s Vin?” Chris asked, ignoring Wilmington’s maudlin humor.

“Need some help here, actually,” Nathan said in that calm, calm way he had when he was healing. Chris came over, his shoulder burning though it had stopped bleeding a while ago. He hoped the bullet wasn’t too far down, because he was pretty sure Nathan would insist on cutting it out instead of letting his body heal permanently around it.

“What can I do?” He knelt next to Nathan and looked down at Vin. Nathan had cut his shirt off to get a better look at the wound. There was an awful lot of blood.

“The bullet went through his shoulder, but I think it’s lodged in his wing.” His eyes were concerned, but not too worried. “Your shoulder up to helping me sit him up and unfold that left one? Damn things are hard to heal. If it’s bad I’d just as soon sew up the rest and save my energy for that.”

“You should probably sew up the rest anyway,” Chris said, his own voice grim.

Nathan looked around, probably for the first time since he started in on Vin. “Buck ain’t too badly hurt, all told. Who else?”

“JD and Josiah are hunting for Ezra now.” Chris kept his eyes on Vin’s chest, watching it rise and fall. “He was invisible when the explosion went off. We don't know how close he was.”

Nathan shook his head. “Shit.”

“Yeah,” Chris agreed. “Where do you need Vin, then?” They needed to save who they could.

Nathan nodded his understanding and directed Chris where he needed him.

*********

“Ezra!”

Josiah stopped his searching and breathed deeply, cleansingly. With his eyes closed, he could sense the others. The awareness of them had been developing as they became united in the energy of the Seven, and now he could at least feel the direction in which they each lay. If they were conscious. Even sleeping minds were beacons, but Ezra wasn’t sleeping…

And Ezra _wasn’t_ dead.

He opened his eyes and looked more closely at the trees before him, trying to trace the path of the explosion’s force. He wandered for a few minutes more before he cursed and strode forward, spying a white oak, huge and old, whose bark had been marred by recent impact.

He stopped short when he stepped on something that squished and felt cold, even through the sole of his boot.

“Here’s hoping I didn’t break his arm,” he muttered. He kneeled carefully, feeling around to find the edges of the invisible man.

How the hell was he supposed to carry him?

He ran his arms over Ezra’s body again, sliding down the sides to see if he couldn’t simply raise him up, and came away with a wetness he hadn’t expected. He looked down at his hand to see blood, stark red and clearly visible, then looked at the ground to see the same—under the invisible body beside him. It had soaked into the leaves and he had been so intent on having found Ezra that he hadn’t processed the fact that he could see the ground _through_ his unconscious friend.

“Yeah, that’s not creepy,” he whispered. He moved his unbloodied hand up to Ezra’s face and patted the unseen, ice cold skin lightly. Funny how it still felt like skin—human skin—frozen and wrapped and invisible as it was.

“Come on, Ezra,” he called. “Wake up now and show yourself.”

Ezra groaned, but didn’t appear.

“If you’re looking to bleed to death, by all means keep hidden,” Josiah said, a little louder still. The puddle wasn’t huge by any means but Nathan couldn’t treat what he couldn’t see.

“You found him?” JD thundered through the rubble between Josiah and the site of the shack. “I looked over on the other side, but there was so much damage, I didn’t think…”

He didn’t think Ezra could have survived it. So he didn’t want to look.

JD reached out to try to touch the small puddle of blood, jerking back when he encountered what Josiah figured was Ezra’s left side. “Yeah, that ain’t creepy,” he said.

Josiah chuckled in response.

“I’m thrilled you find my infirmity… so amusing,” Ezra mumbled weakly. His silver scales sloughed off and evaporated, leaving him visible as he tried to roll on his side and curl around what looked to be a gunshot wound in his side. “Dear God, that hurts.”

“Easy now,” Josiah told him, holding him in place so he wouldn’t damage himself further. “Let’s get you back to the others and patch you up.” He watched Ezra tense at the idea. The gambler and Nathan had come to an understanding, but he’d still never let the man touch him with his healing. “Bandages and blades only, Ezra,” he promised. “Can you stand?”

The younger man closed his eyes a long moment before nodding sharply and allowing Josiah to pull him to standing in one fluid move. Ezra swallowed convulsively for a long moment.

“My head hurts.” His voice was barely audible, and he held almost none of his own weight.

“Reckon the tree probably did a number on you,” Josiah agreed, hefting the man’s arm over his own shoulder and carrying him easily. “Come on. I can carry you if I have to.” He nodded at JD, who followed closely as he made his way back to the others.

*********

“About damn time,” Buck proclaimed sleepily.

Nathan shook his head and looked up to see what had prompted the wounded man’s outburst. Buck wasn’t badly hurt, it was true, but trying to sort Vin out had taken a while. Vin was finally sleeping, his wing stretched out and healed, and Wilmington was flagging, from adrenelin or blood loss, Nathan didn’t know. He’d have to get over there and sort him out.

Except clearly, he was going to have to deal with Ezra first.

Josiah’s entry into their very makeshift camp had prompted Buck’s cry, and the old man was hauling Ezra carefully against his side. Ezra, for his part, was unconscious but at least he was visible.

“Lay him out here next to Vin,” he said quietly. He caught Josiah’s eye as Ezra was laid flat, and looked significantly toward Buck. Josiah took bandages and stitching supplies and headed across the camp.

“Come on, now, Buck,” Josiah boomed jovially. “It’s your turn.”

Ezra’s clothes were untouched by the explosion, Nathan noticed, though the quartet that was currently tied and hurting across the camp were all singed and ashy. Chris and JD watched from their places as he stripped off Ezra’s jacket and widened the rip where his silk shirt had been torn by the bullet.

“Damn,” he muttered, lifting the man carefully and feeling underneath. “Still in there, of course. Gambler can’t do anything by half.”

“He said his head was hurting him, too,” JD supplied, making Nathan frown.

The healer felt along Ezra’s forehead and into his hair, hissing in sympathy at a knot above his ear that was big enough to stun even Josiah. “Hell.”

“Nathan?” Chris asked leadingly. He sat on the other side of Vin, commanding a full view of all three injured men.

Nathan shook his head. “He’ll be hurting for a while. Not silver hurting,” he clarified, referring to the hangover Ezra would sometimes get when he overdid being invisible, “but bad.”

“And his side?” Chris prompted. He had to know as well as Nathan did that, not matter how serious it was, Ezra wouldn’t thank Nathan for trying to heal it. They hadn’t really had that fight yet—there’d never been a reason for Nathan not to back down and just treat him like a doctor would—and luckily, they weren’t going to have it today.

“Don’t look like it hit nothing important,” he pronounced easily. “If I can get the bullet out and the bleeding stopped, he should be fine.”

Ezra twitched violently as Nathan prodded the wound, trying to get an idea of the path of the bullet.

“Calm down you damn fool,” Nathan muttered. “I ain’t gonna lay hands on you.”

The injured man sighed deeply, barely conscious, and slipped a little farther away. Like he was relieved.

Nathan reached for his forceps and scalpel, ready to remove the bullet. He tried hard not to take Ezra’s prejudices to heart—those against healers or against black men—but it was a hell of a thing when a man would rather have you dig through his flesh with a sharp knife than lay a hand on him in healing.

Well, he’d make the stitches small. Least he could do if Ezra insisted on making him leave a scar.

*******

Ezra resisted moaning against the pain in his head and kept his eyes closed, unsure for the moment where he was. It wasn’t the silver—he knew that headache well—but his skull thrummed with some ferocity and his side hurt as well. Where the hell was he?

“Relax, now, Ezra,” Buck’s voice urged him in the darkness, the empath clearly picking up on his worry and confusion. “You got yourself a little blowed up, but you’ll be fine.”

Blowed up? Really? Ezra tried to think past the drums in his head and came up with an image of a stick of dynamite. And Chris hollering Vin’s name.

“Vin?” he whispered, fighting to open his eyes. Others had been hurt too, right? “You were shot,” he said, blinking finally and looking around until his gaze fell on Buck, propped comfortably against a log beside a low fire. It was night. It was confusing.

“Yeah, just winged me. Vin’s sleeping it off, same as Chris.” Ezra’s eyes sluggishly followed Buck’s gesture and focused on Vin lying flat, one wing stretched out beside him. Chris lay near him, though Ezra couldn’t see anything wrong with the man. But he remembered, vaguely. Chris had been hurt as well. Had anyone _not_ been? “Nathan and JD are sleeping too, and Josiah’s on guard duty,” Buck continued, “but I don’t think those damn stage robbers’ll give us any more trouble now they know you ain’t afraid to blow them to bits.”

Stage robbers? Ezra knew he should know all this, but his head simply would not cooperate.

“You might could’ve told us that snakeskin of yours don’t shed when you’re out cold,” Buck said quietly, his tone more serious. “Scared the hell out of Josiah when he found you, all invisible and lying in a pool of blood.”

“Hardly a pool, surely,” Ezra grated, his voice like gravel. He hurt. A lot. Which meant Nathan had kept his promise. He was a good man. “I’m not certain I’ve ever had cause to lose consciousness in the silver.”

“Well don’t do it again,” Buck grumbled. Ezra let his gaze drift back to him, taking in the worried eyes, the arm held gingerly at his side. Buck had been frightened.

There was really no good reason for that to give Ezra such a warm feeling.

“I shall endeavor to try,” he promised.

“You do that,” Buck said staunchly. “Now I’m getting back to sleep and I suggest you do the same. You’re going to have to face Chris in the morning and explain why you tried so damn hard to blow us all up.”

“In fairness, I only meant to blow up the shack,” Ezra said, reveling in the byplay, though he could feel himself starting to slip sideways again. “It’s hardly my fault that there was more in there than met the eye.”

Buck’s relieved chuckle chased him into a warm darkness. “Could say the same of you, you damn cuss.”

Yes, really no good reason. But he _was_ warm...

*******  
the end


End file.
